Spyware Act Loses Its Cookies

from the it's-a-step dept

Congress today took another step forward with their attempt at a piece of anti-spyware legislation by removing the language that included third party cookies as potentially liable under the law. This makes sense, as the cookie issue was likely to be a problem. However, it's not entirely clear if the rest of the law is any good. It tries to ban "phishing, keystroke logging, homepage hijacking and ads that can't be closed except by shutting down a computer." However, it seems like most of these should already be covered by anti-fraud laws, though you could make the argument that it's helpful to have the specifics outlined here. Still, the worry with this type of legislation is that if it's written too broadly, it ends up banning some perfectly legitimate applications.